Louis.de
About the customer
Europe’s No. 1 for motorbikes and leisure
The development of Louis is inextricably linked to the motorbike’s unprecedented success story – its evolution from a means of transport to a vehicle for enthusiasts and a leisure activity.
Over the decades, Detlev Louis transformed a small motorbike repair workshop into Europe’s largest company for motorbike clothing and accessories. His firm belief in the motorcycle’s vast potential meant he always stayed true to his vision – even when other paths might have seemed more lucrative or easier to many. This foresight, his wealth of ideas, as well as his measured, responsible approach and his Hanseatic reliability are just some of the pillars of his success.
About the project
Together with Louis’s team, we replaced an existing CMS, improved both the performance and resilience of the system by utilising the two-stack CMS approach, and seamlessly integrated the e-commerce system into Neos CMS.
How Neos made the difference
Seamless integration of content and shop
Editorial content can be flexibly linked with shop products and categories, letting marketing and shop teams work together on one consistent customer experience instead of maintaining two separate systems.
Top performance even under peak load
The Two-Stack CMS approach separates content authoring (Neos CMS backend) from content delivery: content is pre-published as HTML snippets into a Redis-based content store and served from there. This keeps the site fast and stable even with over 300,000 unique users and 60,000 transactions per day.
Future-proof and secure architecture
Separating the authoring and delivery layers makes the system resilient against attacks and outages while staying extensible for updates, new components, and future support — recognized with the Neos CMS Gold Award 2020.
Technical Highlights
To meet Louis.de's scalability and security requirements, we recommended a "Two-Stack CMS" approach. The core idea is to split the system into two distinct layers: Content Authoring — where editors work, using the Neos CMS backend — and Content Delivery — the layer that serves content to end users on the live website.
Editorially managed content is pre-published from Neos as HTML snippets into a dedicated content store. The delivery layer then reads these HTML snippets from the content store, transforms them if needed, and presents them to the end user — without ever touching the authoring system directly.
For the content store, we recommended Redis as a distributed key-value store. Redis handles replicating content from the Neos CMS authoring system out to the delivery nodes, ensuring fast, reliable access even under high load.
This architectural separation is what allows the system to remain performant and secure even during traffic spikes, while keeping the authoring environment isolated and protected.
Content elements
Transactions per day
Unique users per day
About the agency
Sandstorm is a software agency based in Dresden with a team of 35, specialising in bespoke software, apps and websites. For us, sustainability means resource-conscious, durable and repairable software without customer lock-in thanks to open source, developed with accessibility, user autonomy and security in mind. One of our particular strengths lies in the open-source CMS Neos, to which several Sandstormies contribute (Neos Community Award 2026). We were awarded the Saxon Digital Prize 2022 and were finalists for the German Sustainability Prize 2025. Our clients include 1&1, WeTell, Solarwatt and TU Dortmund.
